Heroes’ Square – The Statue of King Coloman
As you stroll through Budapest’s most important square, among the statues you’ll notice one of King Coloman of Hungary, who reigned between 1095 and 1116. Below the sculpture, which depicts him leaning against a stack of books—his “iconographic” attribute, given that he was also known as Coloman the Learned or Coloman the Book-Lover (in Hungarian Könyves Kálmán, literally meaning ‘the one of the books’)—you’ll see another sculptural work entitled “Coloman Prohibits the Burning of Witches.”
In the code he promulgated around 1100, at paragraph 57, there was indeed a phrase that became extremely famous:
“De strygis vero quae non sunt, nulla amplius quaestio fiat.”
That is, “As for witches, who do not exist, let there be no further discussion of them.”
Thanks to this law of his, King Coloman had earned himself a reputation as a particularly enlightened ruler, not to say progressive.
But how on earth was such a thing possible in 1100?
There Are Witches and Witches…
To properly interpret this phrase of King Coloman’s, we need a brief explanation of “witchology.” Witches, in fact, are not all the same…
The king, in his law, declares that witches do not exist, therefore it’s pointless to obsess over a phenomenon never witnessed. But here’s the catch: the king is talking about strygis, that is, those pagan entities capable of transforming into animals or vampires, flying around at night and doing terrible things during sabbaths.
However, the matter concerning maleficae is different—that is, sorceresses, those absolutely real women who, always drawing inspiration from paganism, create concoctions, bring bad luck, and deceive respectable people.
Them, King Coloman dealt with in paragraph 60 of the same code, expressly stating that they should be punished.
Witch Trials in Hungary
Despite this, although witch trials did occur in Hungary in the following centuries, there were far fewer of them compared to other European countries. Moreover, starting from the 16th century, given Hungary’s non-homogeneous religious composition, such trials were conducted by secular authorities, albeit with the contribution of religious ones, especially during the investigative phase.
