favourite subject alike of the sculptor and of the writers of the clumsy but well-meaning lyrics sung by the priests. Miniature painters, chroniclers, poets, metal workers, and coiners all glorify him. He was the first national ideal of the people to be immortalised in art, and his equestrian statue is the finest relic of the sculpture of the Middle Ages. The church, the folk-lore, and the Latin verses in the Peer Codex have all helped to preserve some remembrance of this ideal knight. The idealistic and chivalric qualities of the Middle Ages in Hungary reached their zenith in his personality.
The spirit of an epoch is expressed not only by the written word, or by statues and pictures, but also by its architecture. In Hungary, as in most other countries, all the great edifices of the Middle Ages were ecclesiastical. Men were content to live in small, dark houses and narrow streets, but their cathedrals were lofty and magnificent buildings, embodiments in stone of their religious zeal. The four most famous ancient monuments in Hungary are all creations of the religious spirit; the Norman cathedral at Ják, the Gothic dome at Kassa, the basilica at Pécs, and the high altar at Lőcse. Every branch of art received its inspiration from religion, and statues and pictures reveal exactly the same naïveté and the same religious fervour as the parchment books of that little library which has been bequeathed to the present generation as the Hungarian literature of the Middle Ages.
The type of ancient Hungarian ecclesiastical architecture is a cathedral, with strongly-built, fortress-like towers at each of the four corners, showing the two prevailing sentiments of the times—the religious and the warlike—cathedral and fortress in one.
