Szent Erzsébet, Szent Vilma és a magyar királyi származás mint toposz Itáliában
Saint Elizabeth, Saint Guglielma and the Hungarian Royal Origin as a Topos in Italy

Summary/Abstract: The paper describes how fictional Hungarian dynastic origin was ascribed to saints in Itali-an literature in the 13–16th centuries. As André Vauchez pointed out, the royal origin of a saint is often a literary-hagiographic fiction; the article analyzes some Italian case studies in order to understand this mechanism. The basis of Hungarian dynastic descent can be found in Saint Martin‟s Pannonian origin and in the cult of the saints of the Árpád dynasty, primarily Saint Elizabeth of Hungary (1207–1231). In the case of Guglielma, fictional Central European origin plays a double part. On the one hand, Guglielma of Milan (+1281/82) was believed to be a Bohemian princess (and cousin of Elizabeth of Hungary), on the other, literary tradition later mixed up her name and some of her attributes with those of the innocently accused queen in the well-known legend (the Saint Guglielma legend). Barbara Newman recently investigated the connection between the two traditions, emphasizing the role of the Visconti family. The paper makes an attempt to demonstrate that the Bohemian origin of Guglielma of Milan is most probably a mere hagiographic topos and that some of the details in certain versions of the Saint Guglielma legend were added later (in the 15–17th century) to the text, and have no historical basis whatsoever.

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