Majorossy Judit: "A királynét megölni nem kell félnetek jó lesz…"Merániai Gertrúd emlékezete, 1213 - 2013. Történeti vándorkiállítás kiállításvezető - A Ferenczy Múzeum kiadványai, D. sorozat: Múzeumi füzetek - Kiállításvezetők 4. (Szentendre, 2013)

Felhasznált irodalom

or the image of a weak-handed Andrew II must be re-evaluated and shaded. The events can be reconstructed mostly on the basis of almost contemporary foreign chronicles and annals, royal donations charters granted to the queen’s favourites, as well as from the vindicative measures taken by Gertrude’s son, the later King Béla IV (1235-1270). Nevertheless, there remains an open question concerning the role of Palatine Banc ban and that of Archbishop John of Esztergom (1205-1223) famous for his ambiguous sentence also used in the title of the exhibition. As opposed to the story fixed in the later Hungarian chronicles (taken over through centuries also by foreign authors), the murderer was not Banc ban but the above-mentioned Reeve Peter the son of Turoy. However, the various sources gave the background and the details of the murder in very diverging ways, their data often contradict each other, and the different elements of the story were superposed on one another in the course of time. Some accounts apologetically defended the queen, while others did the same with the murderers stating that she was guilty.

The foreign-born Gertrude - shamed for the state of the country and thus made as scapegoat - due to the sources must have been a rather firm-handed queen consort. Consequently, her outsider figure easier attracted the wrath of the local nobility. If she had followed the "invisible, benevolent, religious wife model” of her sisters, Hedwig (later the patron saint of Silesia) or Agnes (queen of France) and her own saintly daughter, Elisabeth, she might have avoided her tragic fate.

The early 13th-century event of Queen Gertrude’s murder was (already "falsely”) narrated by several late medieval - early modern - Hungarian chroniclers, basically as the conflict between the queen and Banc ban who was entitled by the king to take care of the country in his absence during his military campaign. This later texts in Hungary already contained the charge against Gertrude helping to seduce the ban’s wife by her brother as the main motif of the murder. Nevertheless, due to the wide European circulation of some of these chronicles, especially the Chronicle of the Hungarians written by Antonio Bonfini, an Italian humanist in the court of King Matthias (1458-1490), the story - actually containing utilizable literary topoi elements - was recycled by Hans Sachs (1494-1576), the German shoemaker and master singer of Nuremberg as well as by George Lillo (1691-1739), the English goldsmith and playwright of London.

In the eye of the general Hungarian public the historical drama of the assassination was fixed and mostly influenced by the 19th-century drama written by József Katona (1791-1830) and the opera by Ferenc Erkel (1810-1893). Since both of these pieces were produced during the time of the Habsburgs’

90