Saint Stephen was the founder of one of medieval Europe’s most stable states, the Kingdom of Hungary, which lasted almost a millennium. His Admonitions to his son, Imre, along with calling for steadfast loyalty to the new Christian faith; also calls on him to welcome foreigners.
“For a country of one single language and one set of customs is weak and vulnerable. Therefore I enjoin on you, my son, to protect newcomers benevolently and to hold them in high esteem so that they should stay with your rather than dwell elsewhere.
Addressing the community in Gauteng Province, which includes Johannesburg and the executive capital of the country, Pretoria, newly-appointed Ambassador András Király spoke of the legacy of Hungary’s founder. He pointed out that the other national days commemorated sad events, like October 23, the day Hungarians remember their Revolution against Soviet oppression. By way of contrast, St. Stephen’s Day was a happy one, which recalled a thousand years of survival. He pointed to the present situation developing in the Middle East and Europe:
“In our day there is a completely new challenge, which not only we Hungarians, but all of Europe has to face. And this is the modern age’s wave of migration, and as it often happens, history repeats itself, where Hungary must defend its own culture and the European culture as well. Even as I speak, at least 3,000 refugees are crossing Macedonia. We saw news reports of heart-rending scenes of women and children arriving at the EU border, the Hungarian border.
“On days like today, we recall St Stephen’s Admonitions on strangers. At the same time, at the time of St Stephen, there was no need to write a law that the nation’s borders had to be defended.”
Ambassador Király compared and contrasted the situation of Hungary in the year 1000 and after, when ”guests” as the king called them, arrived from the Holy Roman Empire, from the Rus, from Volga Bulgaria, from among Turkic peoples like the Pechenegs as well as other, smaller groups. Of course, with the exception of the Volga Bulgars, who were Muslims, Hungary made conversion to Christianity a condition of settlement, and both Muslims and Jews had more rights than most Hungarians and certainly more than in Western Europe.
These rights were codified in 1251 in a special Charter, called a Golden Bulla (after the seal on the document) and Jews and Muslims had royal protection. Muslims lost this when militant Islam, not much different from today’s ”Islamic State” invaded the region under the Ottoman Sultans.
As a result of this history, most Hungarians, Czechs, Poles and other peoples victimised for centuries by the Muslim colonisers and slavers are reluctant to allow mainly Muslim migrants to settle in their countries. Slovakia made an offer recently to accept only Christians, which in light of history and the deliberate persecution of Christians by Muslim militants, is quite reasonable, but was naturally rejected by the EU, who have no concept of living under Islam.
Recently, a call by British churches to Prime Minister David Cameron for Britain to accept refugee Syrian Christians, who are massacred exclusively for their faith, was rejected by the PM. So it seems while the EU is careful not to discriminate against Muslims, it is quite happy to do so against a people experiencing genocide.
Stephen I of Hungary is an interesting figure in European history, as is the country he (re)founded. British historian C.A. Macartney wrote in his book Hungary – A Short History:
“No state in European history has a beginning so precisely definable as Hungary. It was brought into being well-nigh full-panoplied, by a single act, when the Magyars, until then a people without fixed abode, entered the basin of the middle Danube, a place at that juncture as good as masterless, and made it their home. This was in the last years of the ninth century A.D.
In the same way, very few countries had one founder. England, France, Italy, Spain and many other nations were pieced together over the centuries from previous duchies, principalities and smaller territories with their borders only finalised many centuries later.
In the case of Hungary, Stephen had all the countries borders defined by special “border counties” and the only border that was somewhat unstable faced the Holy Roman Empire.
What would the great soldier, statesman and saint do today? Would he invite those who were an ”ornament” to the kingdom, with their new knowledge and weapons, as he says in the Admonitions, or would he just allow anyone in? That is the question the current leadership in the country, and the rest of Europe, has to face.
