Gál Éva: Margaret Island - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2000)
1241 to Dalmatia, took an oath saying that if his country and family were delivered from the hands of the Mongols he would offer up his daughter yet to be born to God, that is, he would enter her into a religious order. And so he did: Princess Margaret, born in 1242, was brought up from the early age of four by the nuns of the Dominicans in Veszprém. In the late 1240s the king decided to have a cloister and a church built for the order on the Island of Hares next to his royal palace; the latter of the two ecclesiastical buildings was raised in honour of the Blessed Virgin. It was in 1251 (according to alternative sources, in 1252) that Margaret and 17 other members of the order moved into the building whose construction had taken several years. Thereupon the king donated, with the sole exception of a small piece of land left in the possession of the Premonstratensian order, the whole island to the nuns, and afterwards continued to pour rich gifts of lands and various privileges on the cloister, which included the profits of the Pest ferry and customs. For that reason, the cloister was subsequently involved in continual conflicts and litigation with the neighbouring proprietors—noble landowners, monasteries, towns (Buda and Pest)—whose interests were thus hurt. It is in part due to such dissension that a comparatively large number of written documents survives in connection with the cloister, mainly from the thirteenth century. In addition to the above, there is evidence of three more important constructions standing on the island in the second half of the thirteenth century: the fortress-like castle of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem (also known as Knights Hospitalers) with its four corner turrets near the southern tip of the island, the monastery and church of the Franciscans around the centre of the island, and, finally, the archbishop of Esztergom’s castle at the northern tip. Far less mention is made of these in contemporary written documents, but the majority of scholarly authorities agree that they must have been built in the few years or decades following the construction of the nunnery at the latest. In any case, in 1278, when King Ladislas IV reinforced the nuns in their proprietorial rights 14
