obtained Pope Silvester II.’s confirmation of this act of sovereignty. Silvester at the same time sent Stephen a consecrated crown, and approved of the erection of an independent Hungarian church, divided into the two provinces of Esztergom and Bacs. But the power of pagan Hungary could not be broken in a day. The focus of the movement was the Maros region, where the rebel Ajtony built the fortress of Marosvar. The struggle proceeded for more than twenty-five years, the difficulties of Stephen being materially increased by the assistance rendered to the rebels by the Greek emperors, his neighbours since their reconquest of Bulgaria. As early as 1015 Stephen had appointed the Italian priest Gellert bishop of Maros, but he was unable to establish the missionary in his see till 1030. The necessity of christianizing his heathen kingdom by force of arms engrossed all the energies of Stephen and compelled him to adopt a pacific policy towards the emperors of the East and West. When the emperor Conrad, with the deliberate intention of subjugating Hungary, invaded it in 1030, Stephen not only drove him out, but captured Vienna (now mentioned for the first time and compelled the emperor to cede a large portion of the Ostmark (1031). Of the five sons borne to him by Gisela, only Emerich reached manhood, and this well-educated prince was killed by a wild boar in 1031. Stephen thereupon appointed as his successor his wife’s nephew Peter Orseolo, who settled in Hungary, where his intrigues and foreign ways made him extremely unpopular. Stephen died at his palace at Esztergom in 1038 and was canonized in 1083. For an account of his epoch-making reforms see Hungary: History.
See Gyula Pauler, History of the Hungarian Nation, vol. i. (Hung.; Pest, 1893); Lajos Balics, History of the Roman Catholic Church in Hungary, vol. i. (Hung.; Pest, 1885); Antal Pór, Life of St Stephen (Hung.; Pest, 1871); János Karacsonyi, Documents issued by Stephen I. (Hung.; Pest, 1892), idem, Life of St Gellert (Hung. ; Pest, 1887); E. Horn, St Etienne, roi apostolique de Hongrie (Paris, 1899); W. J. Winkler de Kétrszynski, Vita sancti Stephani (Cracow, 1897). (R. N. B.)
STEPHEN V. (1239–1272), king of Hungary, was the eldest
son of Bela IV., whom he succeeded in 1270. As crown prince
he had exhibited considerable ability, but also a disquieting
restlessness and violence. In 1262 he compelled his father,
whom he had assisted in the Bohemian War, to surrender twenty-nine
counties to him, so that Hungary was virtually divided
into two kingdoms. Not content with this he subsequently
seized the southern banate of Macso, which led to a fresh war
between father and son in which the latter triumphed. In
1268 he undertook an expedition against the Bulgarians, conquering
the land as far as Tirnova and styling himself henceforth
king of Bulgaria. Stephen was a keen and circumspect
politician, and for his future security contracted, during his
father’s lifetime, a double[1] matrimonial alliance with the Neapolitan
princes of the House of Anjou, the chief partisans of the
pope. He certainly needed exterior support; for on his accession
to the Hungarian throne, as he himself declared, every one was
his enemy. This hostility was due to the almost universal
opinion of western Europe that Stephen was a semi-pagan.
His father had married him while still a youth (c. 1255) to
Elizabeth, daughter of the Rumanian chieftain Roteny, with a
view to binding the Rumanians (who could put in the field
16,000 men; see Hungary: History) more closely to the dynasty
in the then by no means improbable contingency of a second
Tatar invasion. The lady was duly baptized and remained a
Christian; but the adversaries of Stephen, especially Ottakar II.
of Bohemia, affected to believe that Stephen was too great a
friend of the Rumanians to be a true Catholic. Ottakar
endeavoured, with the aid of the Magyar malcontents, to
conquer the western provinces of Hungary, but after some successes
was utterly routed by Stephen in 1271 near Mosony,
and by the peace of Pressburg, the same year, relinquished all
his conquests. Stephen died suddenly on the 6th of August
1272, just as he was raising an army to recover his kidnapped
infant son Ladislaus from the hands of his rebellious vassals.
See Ignacz Acsády, History of the Hungarian Realm, vol. i. (Hung.; Budapest, 1903). (R. N. B.)
STEPHEN, SIR JAMES (1789–1859), English historian, was
the son of James Stephen, master in chancery, author of The
Slavery of the West India Colonies and other works, and was
born in London On the 3rd of January 1789. He was educated
at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, graduating B.A. in 1812, after
which he studied for the bar and was called at Lincoln’s Inn.
He obtained an extensive practice as a chancery barrister,
being ultimately counsel to the colonial department and counsel
to the board of trade. In 1834 he became assistant under-secretary
for the colonies, and shortly afterwards permanent
under-secretary. On his retirement in 1847 he was made a
knight commander of the Bath. In 1849 he was appointed
regius professor of modern history in the university of Cambridge,
having already distinguished himself by his brilliant
studies in ecclesiastical biography contributed to the Edinburgh
Review, which were published that year under the title Essays
in Ecclesiastical Biography and Other Subjects; a 4th edition,
with a short memoir, appeared in i860. He was also the
author of Lectures on the History of France (2 vols., 1851; 3rd ed.,
1857), and Desultory and Systematic Reading, a lecture
(1853). He died at Coblentz on the 15th of September 1859.
STEPHEN, SIR JAMES FITZJAMES, Bart. (1829–1894), English lawyer, judge and publicist, was born in London on the 3rd of March 1829, the third child and second son of Sir James Stephen (q.v.). Fitzjames Stephen was for three years (1842–1845) at Eton, and for two years at Ring’s College, London. In October 1847 he entered at Trinity College, Cambridge. Notwithstanding exceptional vigour in mind and body, he did not attain any of the usual scholastic or athletic distinctions. The only studies then seriously prosecuted in the university course were mathematics and classics. Neither of these attracted him in their academical forms, nor did he care for competitive sport. But his Cambridge time was fruitful in other ways. He was already acquainted with Sir Henry Maine (q.v.), six years his senior, and then newly appointed to the chair of civil law. This acquaintance now ripened into a perfect friendship, which ended only with Maine’s death in 1888. No two men’s intellectual tempers ever presented a stronger contrast. As Stephen himself said, it took them a long time to know when they really agreed. Maine was subtle, swift and far-reaching; Stephen was massive, downright, indefatigable and sincere even to unnecessary frankness. Their qualities were an almost exact complement of one another, but neither of them would take opinions on trust, or acquiesce in commonplace methods of avoiding difficulties; and it might have been said of either of them without exaggeration that, if all his technical and professional requirements could be taken away, a born man of letters would be left. By Maine’s introduction, Stephen became a member of the Cambridge society known as the Apostles, in form not very different from many other essay societies, in substance a body with an unformulated but most individual tradition of open-mindedness and absolute mutual tolerance in all matters of opinion. Perhaps the golden age of the society was a few years before Stephen’s election, but it still contained a remarkable group of men who afterwards became eminent in such different ways as, for instance, James Clerk Maxwell and Sir William Harcourt. Stephen formed friendships with some of its members, which were as permanent, though in few cases so little subject to external interruption, as his intimacy with Maine. Probably the Apostles did much to correct the formalism inevitably incident to the evangelical traditions of the first Sir James Stephen’s household.
After leaving Cambridge, Fitzjames Stephen, having practically to choose between the Church and the bar, decided for the bar. He was called in 1854, after the usual haphazard preparation which was then (and still practically is) considered in England alone, and even in England for one kind of learning
- ↑ Charles, the son of Charles of Anjou, was to marry Stephen’s daughter Maria, while Stephen’s infant son Ladislaus was to marry Charles’s daughter Elizabeth. Another of his daughters, Anna, married the Greek emperor Andronicus Palaeologus.
