Gál Éva: Margaret Island - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2000)

The uncovering of the cloister in progress (1914)

gift, to the fact that the island had been given to the Premonstratensian order by his forbears. Where exactly the first known ecclesiastical building of Margaret Island, the provostal church named after the archangel St. Michael, stood was only revealed by excavations carried out in the 1920s; before that, the ruins of the Franciscan church discussed below were believed to be the ruins of the Premonstratensian church.

The other oldest medieval building, constituting the premises of the court, was rebuilt by Béla IV, which extension resulted in a genuine royal palace in the middle of the thirteenth century. No remains of this building were found until quite recently when, north of the sanctuary of the cloister-church, archaeologists discovered the ruins of a significant building identifiable, almost beyond doubt, as the palace of Béla IV.

However, the largest and most important medieval cluster of buildings on the island was undoubtedly the cloister and the church of the Dominican nuns. These were commissioned by Béla IV for his daughter Margaret, later to be canonised, and other members of her order in the middle of the thirteenth century.

The historical antecedents are well known. Béla IV, who escaped from the Mongol hordes ransacking Hungary in

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