Margaret of Hungary

Margaret of Hungary was a thirteenth-century Hungarian princess and Dominican nun, born in 1242 at the fortress of Klis in Dalmatia, where the royal household had taken refuge during the Mongol invasion of the Kingdom of Hungary. She was a daughter of King Béla IV of Hungary and Queen Maria Laskarina, a princess of the Empire of Nicaea and daughter of Emperor Theodore I Laskaris. In the crisis of 1241–1242 her parents are reported to have vowed that if the kingdom were delivered they would dedicate their forthcoming child to the religious life. The Mongols withdrew from Hungary in 1242, and Margaret was from infancy treated as bound by that vow. She belonged to the Árpád dynasty in a generation already marked by female religious vocations: her sisters included Saint Kinga (Kunigunda) of Poland and Blessed Yolanda of Hungary, and Saint Elizabeth of Hungary belonged to the preceding generation of the same house.

While still a small child she was placed with the Dominican nuns at Veszprém for education and formation. In the early 1250s King Béla founded a new monastery of Dominican nuns dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary on the Island of Rabbits (Nyulak szigete) in the Danube, between Buda and Pest, and Margaret was transferred there. She received the habit of the Order of Preachers and made her religious profession. Medieval testimonies gathered after her death describe a life of marked austerity within the cloister: heavy household labor, prolonged fasting and night vigils, and personal service to the sick and the poor, including those with repulsive or contagious disease. When her father later sought to betroth her to King Ottokar II of Bohemia in order to settle a political conflict after war between Hungary and Bohemia, she refused, insisting that she was bound by valid vows. An inquiry upheld her religious commitment, and she remained a nun.

Margaret died at the island monastery on 18 January 1270, at about twenty-eight years of age. Proceedings to investigate her life and reported miracles were opened soon afterward. In the 1270s a substantial dossier of sworn testimony was recorded from fellow nuns, clergy, and members of the royal family. Despite this early process she was not canonized in the Middle Ages. Her tomb on the island became a pilgrimage site until the Ottoman occupation of Buda in the sixteenth century, when the monastery was destroyed and most of her relics were lost or scattered. Devotion continued in Hungary and in the Dominican Order. Pope Pius VI confirmed her long-standing cult in 1789, an act treated as beatification. Pope Pius XII canonized her on 19 November 1943. The Danube island on which she lived is known today as Margaret Island (Margitsziget) in her memory.

No writings by Margaret herself are known to survive. The principal narrative sources remain the so-called Legend of Saint Margaret, associated with her confessor, the Dominican Marcellus, and the depositions of the thirteenth-century canonization inquest. In later Catholic and Hungarian tradition she is remembered as a royal woman who held to monastic vows against dynastic pressure and as an example of penitential Dominican life among nuns in Central Europe, rather than as a founder, theologian, or writer.