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Patterns of Devotion and Traces of Art. The Pilgrimage of Queen Elizabeth Piast to Marburg, Cologne, and Aachen in 1357
This article focuses on the pilgrimage to Marburg, Cologne, and Aachen, which the Hungarian Dowager Queen Elizabeth Piast undertook in 1357 together with Charles IV of Luxemburg and his wife, Anna of Schweidnitz. During this joint Angevin-Luxemburg pilgrimage, Elizabeth Piast expressed her piety in Marburg at the sepulcher of her holy predecessor, St Elizabeth of Hungary/Thuringia, venerated the relics of the Three Magi in Cologne, and worshipped the Passion and Marian memorials in Aachen, where Charlemagne’s tomb was located, too. The dynastic and political consequences of this pilgrimage were the establishing by Charles IV of an altar of St Wenceslas (1362) and the foundation by the Hungarian queen’s son, King Louis the Great, of a chapel dedicated to his holy predecessors and his country’s patron saints, namely, Sts Stephen, Emeric, and Ladislas (before 1366). By examining a series of written records including chroniclers’ accounts, charters, and treasury inventories, and confronting them with the surviving visual evidence, the author reconstructs the early history of the Hungarian chapel in Aachen and establishes its manifold implications. First, the establishing of a “national” chapel in Aachen was an attempt at conferring to the cult of these regional (Hungarian) saints a new, global dimension. Second, the newly-acquired sacred prestige of the sancti reges Hungariae was transferred further upon King Louis the Great, the chapel’s founder and promoter of his holy predecessors’ cult. The heraldic symbols on the donated objects linked visually the donations and their donor, attesting to the magnificence of the Hungarian royal house in the second half of the fourteenth century, but also to the pious practices and self-representation tools of a dynasty wherein the veneration of its holy predecessors played an important part. Finally, except for increasing the sacral and political prestige of the Angevins, the Hungarian chapel functioned also as a spiritual embassy for Hungarian pilgrims coming in great number for the Aachen Heiligtumsfahrt.